THE YEAR IN NWN: CREATING CONFLICT

From "The Skin You're In"

The fights we bring with us, the conflicts we build here: select stories of social strife from New World Notes in 2006:

"The Skin You're In" - One day, a white woman transforms her avatar into a beautiful African-American-- and begins to see the world (both of them) differently. 

"Unimpeachable Offense" -  What happened when a man tried to rattle Second Life with a political protest and/or griefer scheme.  (This entry could almost fit in the "Epochal Shifts" category, because it inadvertantly demonstrated how large the world has grown-- and how much a sense of Second Life being a single community had been attenuated, in the intervening months.)

"Guarding Darfur" - Superheroes and griefers battle over the information site of a real genocide.

Update, 12/28:  Nearly forgot another milestone in social conflict:  "Trademarking Utopia", the story of an experiment in metaverse democracy which ended in a DMCA suit.